Gloria Bird article summary

Noticing that her fellow natives have not just been colonized, but the minds of her people have been colonized, Gloria Bird focuses her article on her search for a method of mass mental decolonization.  She states that Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony serves as the best auxiliary for this quest, which involves much self-examination and evaluation. Deeming language to be a significant source of identity confusion, she pinpoints a spot in Ceremony where Tayo struggles to piece together the old dialect of the medicine man, Ku’oosh. Due to his dominance in English, Tayo felt that this interfered with his understanding of his family’s language, and made his use of it appear “childish.”  Bird not only directly links this passage to her own history with “old language,” but she also reveals that it evoked within her some “liberating recognition;” she explains that “only in the moments when we are able to name the source of our deepest pain can we truly be said to be free of the burdens they represent.”  Bird furthers her admiration of Ceremony as she demonstrates Silko’s confrontation with “existing hegemonic discourse.”  By addressing, but furthermore specifically identifying, the issues of colonization (not only language, but Christianity, cultural assimilation and marginalization, etc.) Furthermore, as she composes the timeline of her novel sporadically, Silko conveys how every entity in existence is interconnected, even though she “collapses the element of time.”  In sum, Bird believes that Ceremony provides a source of empathy, and, consequently, emotional and mental liberation, for other natives—perhaps, a tool for the decolonization the mind.